Imagined Nation

Abstract

We believe that the best of is in small towns that we get to visit, Sarah Palin told a cheering North Carolina crowd during the 2008 election campaign. real America was not located in Washington, she elaborated, but in these wonderful little pockets, [these] hard working ... pro-America areas of this great nation (qtd. in Eilperin). Within hours the McCain campaign was scrambling to reframe words, but the damage was done. Is the VP candidate saying that small towns are more authentically American than, say, suburbia or cities? asked an outraged Huffington Post (Stein). While American pundits expressed obligatory shock and anger over comments, foreign journalists greeted remarks with a shrug. She didn't need to enumerate [Real America's] salient characteristics, the Irish Times remarked to its readers. Educated by a steady stream of Hollywood movies and American novels, the rest of the world knew exactly what Palin's Real America referred to: it was midwestern, Republican, small-town, second-amendment just-folks. It was apple-pie and Uncle Sam. It probably looked a lot like Lake Wobegon, Minnesota (Powers 11).I revisit this minor political controversy as a means of illustrating certain popular assumptions about national identity, places, and literature. remarks try to make political capital of the popular assumption that authentic national identity is rooted in place. In its response, the Huffington Post reveals another powerful cultural assumption by framing juxtaposition of a small town with Washington, DC, as a manipulative rehash of the binary of country and city, tradition and modernity, knowable communities (Williams 165) and alienated urban life. Irish Times, on the other hand, not only acknowledges the currency of association of small towns with real America, but also draws its readers' attention to the role played by literature, and in particular, Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon series, in constructing this image of the small town as touchstone for American identity. Inherent in remarks and in the controversy surrounding them is a debate over how should be imagined. That real America is, as the Irish Times points out, a fictional construct is not the issue. What is at stake in invocations of a real America is what, and who, gets excluded from idealized visions of the United States.Neil Gaiman's American Gods (2001) tackles the imaginary nature of American identity head on, using the tropes of epic and urban fantasies to interrogate the stresses and contradictions of the imagined community. Ostensibly focusing on a national conflict between the modern gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone (138) and the ancient gods imported to the United States by immigrants, the plot of Gaiman's critically acclaimed novel becomes a springboard for the author's exploration of the role of literature and space in the construction of national identity. As the narrative follows a human ex-convict who finds himself in the employ of the American incarnation of Odin on a road trip across the United States, Gaiman repeatedly stages his protagonist's failure to locate a stable, real America as a means of dramatizing the importance of fiction to social constructions of place and nation.This article begins by considering J. R. R. Tolkien's representation of place besieged by industry in On Fairy Stories (1947), arguing that Tolkien's fetishization of place left an influential legacy for genre fantasy writers. After discussing the ways in which urban fantasy fiction such as Charles de Lint's Moonheart (1984), Tallulah (1991), and The Invisibles (1997), and Megan Lindholm's Wizard of the Pigeons (1984) adapted Tolkienesque fantasy's representation of place, I turn to a close reading of American Gods. American Gods, I argue, not only challenges fantasy literature's tendency to idealize place, but also the arguments of certain geographical and anthropological theorists of space, who see the spaces produced by globalization as eroding local and national identities. …